Why Don’t More Women Ride Motorcycles?

By Ben Labs

Its not hard to say that the motorcycle industry is mostly dominated by Men, but why is that?

In 1998, 8% of all rider were females, that has jumped to 19% showing it has at least doubled in the last 20 years. The Motorcycle style women usually choose is a cruiser with 34% of female riders owing one. Cruisers are usually chosen because of their low seat height and a friendlier nature then a high powered sport bike. Followed by scooters at 33% and only 10% choosing sport bikes.

So now lets go more into the demographic characteristics with the mean age of a women owning a motorcycle is 39 years old versus 48 for men. Some more demographics I saw was that Half those women perform their own maintenance on the bikes and half are married. 47% have a college or high school degree and Women are usually safer then men with 60% taken a motorcycle training course vs 42% for men. You can look at different rations like 60-40 or 70-30, but right now a 81-19 ratio is highly skewed.

Why aren’t women riding more? There is different views to this but, my view is because of Societal pressure. Where a lot of people see motorcycling as a Men’s hobbie and the judgement and pressure from their peers can have a big impact.

Another thing male riders seem to take for granted is their choice in gear. manufactures know this is a male dominated industry so they don’t invest time or the energy in women specific gear. Guys are the only ones designing gear so for women most colors come in just black and pink.

It’s always good to have more riders on the road everyone’s taking the same risk hopping on two wheels. Some things we can do is introduce motorcycles early in life like dirt bikes and things like that. The earlier you expose somebody to something the higher chance they join it in the future. At the end of the day the more people ride and more bikes on the road is a good thing whether that’s more guys or more girls its more people raising awareness for your hobby, promoting it positively and showing its not limited to a small number of the population.